The back office of global finance earns substantial revenue from work that few people see. A new report from the Solana Research Institute says much of that revenue would change hands if those operations moved to public blockchains.
The Solana Research Institute, or SRI, estimates the global annual revenue pool for financial market infrastructure (FMI) at $31.5 billion. Without regulatory safeguards for existing operators, it projects that only $11.2 billion would remain with today’s incumbents.
According to SRI’s calculations, the remaining $20.3 billion would go to users and new competitors in the form of lower costs.
Where the money goes
FMI can be thought of as finance’s toll roads: the venues and back-office systems that match, clear and settle trades, ensuring buyers receive their assets and sellers get paid.
SRI divides that toll revenue into several streams, which face different levels of risk. Trading is the most exposed.
The institute considers the $13 billion in trading revenue fully at risk for incumbents, arguing that competition among onchain markets would likely take that entire share from current players.
Clearing presents a different picture. SRI estimates clearing revenue at $10 billion and projects that about $6.8 billion would survive the transition.
Clearing involves standing between parties in a trade and absorbing losses if one side fails to pay. The report argues that longer-term trades would still require someone to manage that default risk, whether or not they use blockchain.
A post promoting the findings on X described the surviving share as just over $10.5 billion in traditional infrastructure revenue in an unprotected shift onchain. The report’s breakdown puts the retained amount at $11.2 billion out of $31.5 billion.
The new business lines
The report does not focus solely on incumbent losses. SRI also points to four categories of onchain services that could each bring in single-digit billions of dollars annually.
The first is cross-venue collateral pooling. In practice, this would let traders use a shared pool of collateral across several platforms, rather than making separate deposits on each one.
The second is prediction market clearing, which brings the default-management role described above to markets where participants wager on real-world outcomes.
The third category is high-value cross-border payment settlement assets, onchain instruments that would be used to complete large international payments.
The fourth is multi-stablecoin acceptance infrastructure, the tools that would allow a business to accept payment in multiple stablecoins without managing each one separately.
Who is behind the numbers
SRI is a Switzerland-based nonprofit founded in April 2026. It published its FMI report on October 30, 2026, and promoted it on X on November 10, 2026.
Its members include Angus Scott, former head of innovation at Euroclear, as well as the Solana Foundation, Jito, R3, Figment, Helius and Alchemy.
The roster brings together experience in traditional market infrastructure and firms closely involved in the Solana ecosystem. Readers should take that into account when assessing the analysis: the authors have a clear interest in finance moving to public chains.
What this means
The key word in the report’s central estimate is “unprotected.” SRI’s $11.2 billion figure assumes regulators take no action to protect existing operators, an assumption that carries much of the weight.
For the Solana ecosystem and other public-chain developers, the $20.3 billion figure is a way to size the opportunity. It presents the potential as savings for users and space for new entrants, not revenue that blockchains would automatically capture.
Lower costs would benefit users, but they would not guarantee profits for the builders of new infrastructure, because competition is precisely what drives those savings.
The four new service categories offer builders a potential source of fresh revenue. SRI estimates each could generate single-digit billions annually, making them significant businesses if they materialize.
Source: cryptobriefing.com. Adapted by NBTC.
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